Comment by keiferski
4 days ago
A big part is that the rationalist community has little respect for traditional philosophical arguments. Consequently they don’t really understand how to make an argument, in the sense of a formal logical framework that can be summarized and critiqued.
Instead they seem to take one premise and just run with it, and tens of thousands of words later, they think they’ve made some profound point.
I’d say that 99% of the rationalist essays I’ve read wouldn’t be given passing grades in an academic philosophy class on the topic.
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
>Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work
My reading is the inability to understand serves only as an educational device for the reader. After all, at the end of the article the only point of contention is whether or not the objective truth exists. Is your point that the postmodern types don't claim that it doesn't? Or that they're an easy target used to later claim victory against a larger group?
Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.
On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.
I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp. It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
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Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
t. majored in philosophy
I was being the term academic philosophy to mean the entirety of historical and contemporary thought, not specifically just papers published recently.
That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
I also really don’t think you can just hand wave away the entire history of ideas with vague statements like “from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.”
This attitude is exactly why rationalism is a goofy internet thing and not an actual intellectual movement.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and IME the idea that papers published in leading analytic journals are obscure on purpose is nonsense. There is no tolerance for the kind of handwavy arrogance you’ll find in “internet thought” on blogs and social media.
>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
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This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.
I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.
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> Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy.
They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.
But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.
The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.
I also studied philosophy.
--- ¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.
> traditional philosophical arguments
Can you share some good books/papers/posts that would be a good introduction to for this?
Any intro to philosophy book is probably good really. But I did just get this one the other day, and I like it:
50 Philosophy Classics by Bowdon.